Semiotics is a theory of signs and symbols, specifically dealing with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages, including syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Language in all forms is semiotics in action because whenever entities communicate, they do so by exchanging groupings of mutually agreed upon signs. Here, “language in all forms” can be though of as any interaction between entities (can be the same entity) that results in conscious or non-conscious activity Culture, education, age, ethnicity, etc., all play a role in which signs are mutually agreed upon and how the signs may be used.
Whether people are born with an innate understanding of language is debatable. Barring organic trauma, people are born with an ability to communicate wants, needs, and desires. At some point the innate ability to communicate may be overlaid with an understanding of which specific interactions produce which specific results (an example is “language in all its forms”). This point harkens to one of the rules of semiotic information—“the first communication must be instructions on how to build a receiver.”
The construction of language from primitive communication takes the form of the acquisition of psycholexicals, or conceptual primitives. Conceptual primitives are the archetypes of language and often take the form of words that describe things rather than things in themselves. For example, “water” can be thought of as the conceptual primitive of ocean, lake, river, rain, etc. “Big” is closer to being a true conceptual primitive because “big” is used as an adjective in most languages that support such grammar constructs. Conceptual primitives are the building blocks of understanding and recognition of the individual's environment and are the internal precursors of language.
The most basic conceptual primitives are binary and usually comprised of mythic opposites such as “good” and “bad”. The child learning to lingualize its experience does so by interacting with its environment in the presence of others with more developed language skills. What usually happens is that the child's first lingualizing experiences of its environment are polarity commands such as “come”, “go”, “hot”, “cold”. These lingualizations become conceptual primitives and place the child into a mythic reality due to their polar, binary nature; something either “is” or “is not”. Later the child learns that shades of gray exist and begins to experience sensory reality. Language develops when the child begins applying conceptual primitives to create more complex communications. These psycholexicals or conceptual primitives stay with the individual long after sophisticated language skills develop and remain how the individual—regardless of age, gender, or education—initially internalizes information. Further, these psycholexicals are highly culture and language specific.
All language-using species create language semiotically. A child learning to speak learns that certain sounds will be rewarded with certain actions. This is first accomplished by making sounds to be rewarded with objects in the child's immediate surroundings. The child sees a cookie and says, “Cookie”, to an American English speaker, the child gets a cookie. If the child were from a different culture and language set, saw a cookie and said, “Bistoli” to a speaker of only American English, the child would be unrewarded. Language is a well-defined set of semiotic equations in which the signifier is culturally accepted as being psycholexically equivalent to the object that is culturally defined.
From this it is derived that any form of communication is a series of semiotic equations. Language is not limited to oral communication. Signed languages such as Ameslan, Singlish, Freslan, etc., contain the same richness of concept spaces, psycholexical primitives, and so on. Further, language generation is not engaged only when the speaker is being heard. An individual that communicates frequently with hand gestures will engage in many of those same hand gestures while on the phone. When a person is engaged with something on the television, that person may speak to the television without any delusion of being heard.
At the point where conceptual primitives become active in communication, they change role from conceptual primitive to modality. A modality is a conceptual primitive, which is active either consciously or unconsciously in the psyche of an individual and comes in two flavors: sensory and internal. Sensory modalities are those conceptual primitives directly related to primate sensory systems (vision, hearing, etc.) as expressed through information exchange and communication. Internal modalities are those conceptual primitives by which information is expressed both to ourselves and to others.
Software has been designed in the past to facilitate communication between individuals and programmable devices. Web sites for instance permit this type of communication. However, the communication facilitated has been rather shallow. The programmable devices are typically limited to links (essentially invitations to further pages accepted by clicking on those links) or word matching, such as locating pages containing words for which the user is searching. Programmable devices require a user to explicitly communicate or, perhaps more precisely, only react to explicit, conscious communications from the user. Richer communication between individuals and programmable devices requires allowing a programmable device to recognize non-conscious communication and/or implicit communication.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.